By Aditya Soni and Toby Sterling

March 16 (Reuters) - Amsterdam-based AI infrastructure firm Nebius Group ( NBIS ) said Monday it has signed a five-year deal with Meta Platforms ( META ) to provide the social media giant with $12 billion of AI computing capacity across multiple locations by 2027.

Under the deal, Meta will also buy an additional $15 billion worth of capacity planned by Nebius ( NBIS ) over the coming five years if it is not sold to other customers, giving the contract a total value of up to $27 billion, Nebius ( NBIS ) said. 

Last week, Nvidia ( NVDA ) said it would invest $2 billion for an 8.3% stake in Nebius ( NBIS ), which uses Nvidia ( NVDA ) chips in its data centers.

DATACENTER RACE

The deal is the latest sign of U.S. tech giants racing to supplement their own AI data-centre build-outs by locking in scarce GPU and power capacity from "neocloud" providers like Nebius ( NBIS ).

Neocloud firms Nebius ( NBIS ) and U.S. competitor Coreweave ( CRWV ) provide infrastructure but hope to become major cloud service providers in their own right.

Nebius ( NBIS ) CEO Arkady Volozh said the latest Meta deal would help "accelerate the build-out and growth of our core AI cloud business." 

It signed an initial $3 billion deal with Meta in November and a $17.4 billion deal with Microsoft in September.